Design Spotlight: Idlewild

Depending on where your trivia strengths reside, there’s a good chance you might have read the title of this article in your RSS or Twitter feed as either the former name of JFK Airport, a Prohibition-era movie starring Big Boi, or an Allman Brothers album. But you, good sir, would be incorrect because today’s Design Spotlight is actually a font.

Fonts may not be our usual fare, but we’ll take it on good faith that you find Comic Sans as revolting as we do (e.g. Higgs-Boson font-snobannouncementfail). Combined with our soft-spot for good things, great branding and the newly announced Idlewild ($99), we just couldn’t resist. It’s just that good. With a simple and broad aesthetic, Idlewild is a craftsman’s font. It lives somewhere between engineering and design and with just a little coaxing it can totally transform your next project, or this post (see below). All of its five variants play nicely with the other typographic kids in your font pool too. And it’s no wonder, because Idlewild comes from the masters at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

H&FJ likens Idlewild to a well-balanced knife or a performance engine and it’s hard not to agree. Maybe its user is a NASA engineer with a penchant for design, or a photographer who can’t help but train his camera on other cameras, or simply a finder of good things. Either way, if you happen to be one of those people who spend as much time trying to pick the right font as you do your words, consider Idlewild a must-have for the collection.

The Briefing

Long gone are the days when the commuter bike was an old-school mountain bike with a potpourri of parts and a rear wheel that was only roughly true. A rise in people looking to build fitness, lower their carbon footprint or simply have fun while getting around has created a big market for commuter bikes. Here are some of our favorites for 2015.